3dsmax 2014. Having an awful time w/ this. I'm trying to animate both a cape and a skirt (similar to slave Leia's) using bones. After reading a couple tutorials, I've been trying IKSpline along the edges of the skirt. The problem is, I can't link/reposition the skirt and bones to/near the pelvis. As soon as I move one of the helper verticies, the skirt goes mental, transporting to elsewhere in the scene and deforming in odd ways. I've heard tell resetting xform is panacean for this sort of thing but there must be some sort of trick to it because it doesn't work for me.

If anyone can solve or knows of a better bone type solution, plz let me know. Not currently interested in cloth simulation etc.,... Thnx.

Too badyoure not interested incloth simulation... Its really easy to do and to transfer on your bone setup.

Now aout that issue... From what i see its a skin modifier issue. Go to your t pose, turn off the skin modifier( nothing should move) then save your filebecause this tricks inst undoable.
Now open the skin advanced parameters rollout then uncheck and recheck always deform. Turn the skin modifiers back on.

You most likely added the cape bone late during the process of skinning.... Even though its not an issue doing it on a different pose than the original skinning pose will cause this type of issue.

No it wont, thats why you need to transfer this simulation into another rig
Eg: your gamemesh is driven by a skeleton, this skeleton is constrained to another high res mesh that you use to simulate cloth